Jeremi got to try his hand at the grill too, not so much so that he could help, but so that he could update his Facebook profile picture. For the last while he'd been using this picture from our weekend at their place last June, back when his hair was short:
And now it's been replaced by this one, from just over a week ago:
It wasn't actually all that warm, but he brought along the same clothes so he could recreate the picture, even though the shorts are different, and a new house has appeared in the frame since last time.The next morning Jeremi helped Calin replace the snow tires on their car, and I started work altering the pattern for the wedding dress to make the skirt patchworked. I got some plastic tracing sheets so that I still have the intact paper pattern pieces in case of disaster.
And here you can see half the skirt laid out on the ground, with the four panels split into 60 smaller panels. (Yes, that means that this whole skirt will have 120 pieces of fabric sewn together, but that's still an order of magnitude less than what Jeremi's doing. Of course that's only for the outer skirt of one dress...)
I think it looks like a giant fly wing spread out on the floor. Perhaps I'll change the whole dress idea and turn it into an insect costume...That Sunday we had our friends Julia and Marc over for supper. It was to fulfill an invitation for Marc's birthday, when I'd promised to make him a savoury chocolate feast. This was because all four of us had wanted to sign up for a savoury chocolate cooking course at the Volkshochschule here (like a community college sort of), but there was only room for two of us, so Julia and I had gone together.
I had wanted to make one of the dishes that we hadn't made in the course, but for which she'd given us the recipe: rabbit legs in a chocolate sauce. I'd lost the recipe however, so I ended up using this one. The sauce was really rich, with lots of ground nuts and cocoa and cooked down onions and garlic with just a bit of spice, but the meat was only so-so. The leftover sauce was practically a meal on its own though. This wasn't the only chocolaty dish though - we started with sweet potato ravioli in cocoa dough (with the filling recipe from this book by Marcella Hazan, and about 1/2 cup of cocoa added to a standard 3 egg pasta dough), followed by beets in a blood orange juice/truffle oil/white chocolate dressing with mint. It sounds disgusting, but tasted really good, and I completely ripped off the idea from this site, though they don't give an actual recipe. I left it in the oven to stay warm though, and the mint really wilted, which was unfortunate. The meal was accompanied by the sort of molasses and cocoa-containing "brown bread" that's really common in parts of the maritimes and New England, but which is unheard of here. The bread turned out wonderfully, and Jeremi was in heaven when he got to eat the leftovers with a bowl of molasses. Maritimers and their molasses, I'll never understand. (I tried to find the Crosby molasses TV commercial that used to run in Halifax when I lived there, which Rishad and I found so funny, but it seems that no one found it amusing enough to post on youtube.) For dessert we made chocolate lava cakes based on a recipe in an ad for Ghirardelli chocolate in an issue of Bon Appetit that my mom left here when they were visiting. I found the same recipe online here. While the cakes were truly gorgeous, they didn't look quite as impressive as the picture. Still, they were rich and delicious. We all ate way too much.
Which brings us to this weekend, when we ate too much again. This was yet another meeting of our French cooking, eating, and speaking group. This time it was at the new apartment of Matthias and Constanze, and the theme was "en flammes". Everything had to be flambéed or brûléed or something similar. We were also joined by a couple friends of Constanze and Matthias, Julia and Andreas (and their daughter Livia, who was mostly sleeping). This brought the number of Julias to three, leading to some confusion.
The first course can be seen here, and was a carpaccio of beef, with a bit of balsamic slightly caramelized with a torch, topped with arugula and cheese. Just delicious.
This was followed by the salad course, which was a spinach salad with egg and bacon, which was topped with a flaming dressing. You really can't go wrong when the oil in your vinagrette is hot bacon fat.
For the main course we were planning on preparing this recipe: Salmis de faisan au foie gras flambé à l'armagnac. According to the Joy of Cooking, salmi is an old French dish that used to be made by partially cooking small game birds, removing the meat, and then grinding the bones with a mortar and pestle into the sauce with which the meat is served. This has been modernized a bit to make it an easier dish to create, and also to make it seem less like something that witches would do, by just boiling the cut-up carcasses in the sauce and then removing them, rather than grinding them to a paste.Saturday morning we set out with Barbara, one of the French meal attendees, to go to the market and various grocery shops to try to hunt down the ingredients. At the market I'd noticed that one of the booths was a butcher that had at least a few small birds on display, so I thought we might be able to find pheasant (faisan) there. No luck, but we were able to find squab (pigeon), which the Joy of Cooking suggested. None of us had ever had pigeon before, so it seemed like a fun thing to try. We got six pigeons for eight people, and doubled the sauce used in the recipe.
Next we set off in search of Armagnac, an eau-de-vie produced from white wine in the south west of France. We went to a specialty wine shop, but they didn't have any at the time. (This may seem strange to North Americans, but it's actually much easier to get specialty products in Canada than it is in Jena. You know, because France is so far away from Germany.) We also tried the grocery store, but they didn't even have cognac, let alone armagnac. And so the recipe was altered yet again.
Next, we wanted to find foie gras. What shocked me was not that we were unable to find it (we're faced with the inability to find ingredients at least weekly), but that no one who we asked even knew what it was. It wasn't our broken German either, Barbara is German, and did most of the talking for us. Even asking at the butcher department of the fancier grocery store, we were met with blank stares. And so we decided to enrich the sauce with goose pâté instead, even though the first two ingredients were from pork. As such, the recipe became "Salmis de pigeons au pâté flambé au cognac", rather than the original "Salmis de faisan au foie gras flambé à l'armagnac". Still, the results were good. Here Jeremi and I are hard at work, me with the sauce, him with the deboned meat and the mushrooms sautéing together (pigeon meat is delicious by the way, with rich, red, meaty breasts, reminiscent of duck). In the foreground is the colander filled with what went into the sauce, including 6 tiny carcasses.
Why do I look so happy here? Because the pan is flaming of course.
Perhaps you can see it better now?
We didn't get any pictures of the actual dish, but it was served atop polenta, and with steamed broccoli. The polenta was supposed to be oven toasted triangles, but somehow drying them in the oven rather than a frying pan as I've done before caused the initially solid shapes to melt a little, unfortunately. Still, it tasted quite good!
For dessert Julia prepared crêpes Suzette, which were delicious and quite impressive to behold as she ladled flaming cointreau all over the caramel-sauced crêpes. Unfortunately the only picture we managed to get was from earlier, as she was preparing the batter.
In all, it was a lovely night, and we ate and drank lots of wine, until Matthias finally kicked us out at 3:30. Walking home (with the two folding chairs that we'd brought with us), Jérémi realized that while changing into his fancy new linen pants before going for supper, he'd neglected to transfer the contents of his pockets. And so we had no keys and no cell phone. (Of course I didn't have any keys with me - that's Jérémi's job!)This is the first time that we've locked ourselves out since moving here (excluding when I was living in the tower, and only had to ask my next-door neighbour at the time Calin to climb out his window and walk around to climb in my window), but luckily Calin and Susanne have a spare set of keys. Unfortunately they live a bit outside of town, and it was really late and dark to be walking up there with our folding chairs and cooking supplies. The first thing we did was hide the chairs somewhere, and then we went looking for a cab to bring us up to Cospeda. Luckily they were home, and weren't mad at us for waking them up at 4:00 in the morning. And this way, they got to have us over again yet another time before Jérémi leaves!
The next morning we all walked down into the city for brunch and to enjoy the beautiful weather. It's really summertime here now almost. Here they are on the way down the hill, with a view of the city below.
And the lilacs have even come out!
And this morning it was warm enough to eat breakfast on the balcony, enjoying the sunshine, and checking out all our plants that have either survived what they call a winter here, or have already started growing back. Next to me you can see chives, which are almost flowering, and there are some sprigs of dill coming up in the box immediately behind me. At the far left is the thyme which overwintered beautifully, and which shares a planter with oregano which died off, but which is regrowing beautifully. In the foreground is a box where both marigolds and nasturtiums managed to reseed enough that we only had to water a bit to help them on their way. Jérémi did a great job getting everything tidied up and ready for this summer.
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